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Forty years before becoming Israel’s top decision-making duo, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak first made news on the blood-stained wing of a hijacked Belgian airliner.

Disguised as tousle-haired mechanics, with slim pistols concealed beneath their white overalls, Israel’s future prime minister and defence chief had stormed the Sabena jet at Lod airport near Tel Aviv as part of Sayeret Matkal, the secret special forces regiment which Barak, then just aged 30, led.

Netanyahu, eight years younger, was largely untested in counter-terrorism operations.

“It was the first time I had ever held a handgun,” he would later remember.

The dozen or so clambering commandos killed two Palestinian Black September gunmen and overpowered two grenade-wielding women with them.

One of the 100 hostages died but the raid was hailed a master-stroke, the only casualty among Barak’s men being Netanyahu, shot in the arm by a comrade — “He took it just fine,” the unit’s then deputy chief, Danny Yatom, recalls dryly.

In February 1973, Ehud Barak, the commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit, obtained photographs and precise information on the whereabouts of three senior PLO leaders.Barak and his team immediately began planning on an operation to eliminate them. The plan they came up with was to land from navy ships on the Lebanese coast and infiltrate into Lebanon disguised as tourists, with some of the commandos to be disguised as women (Barak was disguised as a brunette woman). During the operation, three of the highest-level PLO leaders, surprised at home, were killed, along with other PLO members.

These missions are of the few by Sayeret Matkal on which details have been made public, crystallizes for many Israelis the view that Netanyahu and Barak still today operate as a covert team, crafting strategy with a maverick intimacy born behind enemy lines and a clubby elitism that eclipses their markedly divergent personalities and politics.